Semantic web portal and platform

ABSTRACT

An application that enables users to effectively utilize and manage knowledge and data the user posses and allows other users to effectively and seamlessly benefit from the user&#39;s knowledge and data over a computer network is also disclosed. A method of processing content created by a user utilizing a semantic, ontology-driven portal on a computer network is described. The semantic portal application provides the user with a content base, such as a semantic form or meta-form, for creating a semantic posting. The semantic portal utilizes a knowledge data structure, such as a taxonomy or ontology, in preparing a semantic posting based on the information provided by the user via the content base. The semantic portal application prepares a preview of a semantic posting for evaluation by the user. The semantic posting is then either modified by the user or accepted and posted by the user for external parties to view.

PRIORITY CLAIM

The present invention is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser.No. 12/197,207, now U.S. Pat. No. 8,275,796 B2, filed Aug. 22, 2008entitled “SEMANTIC WEB PORTAL AND PLATFORM” which is a continuation ofU.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/062,125, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,433,876B2, filed Feb. 19, 2005, entitled “SEMANTIC WEB PORTAL AND PLATFORM”which claims priority to U.S. Provisional Patent Application No.60/546,794 filed on Feb. 23, 2004, the content of which are incorporatedherein by reference.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

1. Field of the Invention

The present invention relates to computer software and Internetapplications. More specifically, the invention relates to softwareenabling improved communication, management of knowledge, andconnectivity among entities over a computer network.

2. Introduction

Present, widely used, public web portals typically organize informationaccording to topics rather than type. In instances where information isorganized by type, the various types between portals are ofteninconsistent and unstructured. The same portals also do not organizeinformation (stored on behalf of its users) utilizing relationships thatinformation has with other information, such as people and places, onthe network or in the portal. Public portals organize data on the publicweb using public taxonomies and fail to display or convey information onconnections between information and knowledge in their directories.Furthermore, they fail to organize personal or group information.Although enterprise portals are capable of organizing group or teaminformation, they are often inaccessible to the public or to individualsand are expensive and monolithic. Even less utilitarian and intelligentwith respect to organizing information are the popular online searchengines which are completely unstructured and typically organizeinformation and data by relevance to keywords.

Therefore, what is needed is a single location and application on anetwork where a user can organize public, group, and private/personalinformation and have this single, location accessible to the public.What is needed is a new, ontology-driven portal that organizes all threecategories of data according to various “facets” using underlyingontologies to define each “facet” and wherein any type of informationcan be classified and linked to other types of information. That is,what is needed is an application that enables a user to effectivelyutilize and manage knowledge and data the user posses and allows otherusers to effectively and seamlessly benefit from the user's knowledgeand data over a computer network.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

Additional features and advantages of the invention will be set forth inthe description which follows, and in part will be obvious from thedescription, or may be learned by practice of the invention. Thefeatures and advantages of the invention may be realized and obtained bymeans of the instruments and combinations particularly pointed out inthe appended claims. These and other features of the present inventionwill become more fully apparent from the following description andappended claims, or may be learned by the practice of the invention asset forth herein.

In one aspect of the invention, a method of processing content createdby a user utilizing a semantic, ontology-driven portal on a computernetwork is described. The semantic portal application provides the userwith a content base, such as a semantic form or meta-form, for creatinga semantic posting. The semantic portal utilizes a knowledge datastructure, such as a taxonomy or ontology, in preparing a semanticposting based on the information provided by the user via the contentbase. The semantic portal application prepares a preview of a semanticposting for evaluation by the user. The semantic posting is then eithermodified by the user or accepted and posted by the user for externalparties to view.

In another aspect of the invention, a method of sharing information on asemantic-based network is described. A semantic portal applicationintercepts an e-mail message via an outgoing mail server or an incomingmail server. It then creates a semantic object from the e-mail messageby examining syntax of the e-mail message inline, for example bydetecting brackets, colons, and certain keywords indicating data type.The semantic posting is then make viewable by the public.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

In order to describe the manner in which the above-recited and otheradvantages and features of the invention can be obtained, a moreparticular description of the invention briefly described above will berendered by reference to specific embodiments thereof which areillustrated in the appended drawings. Understanding that these drawingsdepict only typical embodiments of the invention and are not thereforeto be considered to be limiting of its scope, the invention will bedescribed and explained with additional specificity and detail throughthe use of the accompanying drawings in which:

FIG. 1 is a flow diagram of a process of creating a semantic posting inaccordance with one embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 2 is a flow diagram of a process of sharing information on asemantic network in accordance with one embodiment of the presentinvention.

FIG. 3 is a flow diagram of a process of managing interrelated knowledgeobjects in accordance with one embodiment of the present invention.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

Various embodiments of the invention are discussed in detail below.While specific implementations are discussed, it should be understoodthat this is done for illustration purposes only. A person skilled inthe relevant art will recognize that other components and configurationsmay be used without parting from the spirit and scope of the invention.

The Metaweb is the next-generation of the Web, based on semanticmicrocontent. Radar Networks is the Metaweb company. We run the MetawebPortal on our Metaweb platform, and we make Metaweb software forend-users and enterprises.

In Phase 1 we will create a Web-based Metaweb Portal running on theRadar Platform. The portal will be designed to become the “Hub of theSemantic Web.” Users may interact with the Portal via any Web browser,email client, RSS client, or XML-RPC or SOAP client.

The Portal will provide free services as well as premium services tousers. The free services will enable anyone to search the portal and tocreate their own ad-supported public or private Metawebs. Premiumservices will include paid listings to premium Metawebs, additionalstorage space, additional security/privacy, larger numbers of membersper Metaweb, marketing, commerce, and priority performance, co-branding,no-ads or run-your-own-ads on your Metaweb, priority or longer-livedagents, etc. Simultaneously, or soon after, we will give away a free,optional, open-source desktop tool for publishing and subscribing to theMetaweb. This tool will also have built-in capabilities for sharingmicrocontent objects with other users via email and/or p2p and/or IM.

In Phase 2 we will provide a free, low-end, open-source Metaweb Server,that enables anyone to host their own Metawebs on their own machine. InPhase 3 we will sell a commercial Metaweb Server that enables any groupor enterprise to run their own industrial-strength Metaweb service onthe network. On this server we will provide various applications forenterprise collaboration, KM, etc.—based on the technology we developfor the public Metaweb Portal.

The first applications of the Metaweb Portal will be to:

-   -   Provide every individual user, or group, with their own        Metaweb—a new kind of site about them, which can link to/from        Metaweb sites created by their friends and by groups they have        relationships with. They can use their Metawebs for:        -   Building a new kind of homepage about themselves, their            group or their organization or product        -   Participating in communities and social networks        -   Publishing their ideas and information        -   Marketing things to others        -   Requesting things from others        -   Publishing a semantic weblog        -   Sharing knowledge with a group or team        -   Managing projects and tasks with groups        -   Sharing calendars        -   Sharing files and data    -   Provide a top-level ontology of Metaweb node types    -   Provide top-level taxonomies of Knodes for topics (from the open        directory, dmoz.org taxonomy of topics, and possibly the Library        of Congress taxonomy, as well as other taxonomies that can be        added by users, such as a medical taxonomy, etc.)    -   Seed the network by creating top-level public Metawebs for        particular topics of interest, such as:        -   Music (all about music)        -   Places            -   Countries (all about various countries)                -   Cities (all about various cities)                -   Destinations (places)        -   Sports (all about sports)        -   Business            -   Industries            -   Professions        -   Literature (all about literature)        -   Politics        -   Kids        -   Hobbies            -   Cooking            -   Collecting        -   Technology (A Metaweb about technology)        -   Products (A Metaweb about products)            -   Cameras            -   Computers            -   Software            -   Autos        -   Cultures            -   Religion            -   Ethnic            -   National        -   Lifestyles            Main Features of the Portal            Login/Join

When joining Metaweb the user creates an account. A user accountincludes a login name, a password, payment info, plus one or morealternate identity personas each with its own detailed and extensibleuser profiles and preferences. When logged into their account, users maycreate content via their identities, and may see content and enact rolesthat their identities have permissions for. If users do not login thenby default they are considered to be logged in as “Guests” withcorresponding roles and permissions (usually public-read-only, exceptwhere public-read-write is permitted).

Create/Admin a Metaweb

A Metaweb is semantic web site comprised of interrelated knowledgeobjects (“knodes”). To create a new Metaweb a user must login to theiraccount. From their account a user can start any number of Metawebs.

The default type of Knode is a “Node.” A Node is a generic form that hasbasic header info, an admin section, and a large freeform area that cancontain formatted content. As well as generic “Nodes,” Knodes can alsobe set to other types in order to embody particular preset semanticstructure such as a Person, Project, Document, Question, Topic, etc.

Within the body of a Knode users may add and format content in a mannerthat is similar to Wikis That is they can easily create new Knodes byusing particular syntax while adding content, and they may useparticular syntax to format content and add semantic links.

Each Metaweb has its own unique namespace which is the equivalent of adomain on the Web. All knodes in a Metaweb are addressed within thenamespace of that Metaweb.

Every Knode in a Metaweb can be accessed via a Web page. When a newKnode is created, unless otherwise specified, it is defaulted totype=Page. The type setting of a Knode can be changed to any valid typeafter the Knode is created (however if content has been filled into theKnode it may or may not map into the new type structure. In such case,content will not be lost but will not be displayed if invalid, or theuser will be given a choice of how to map into the new structure?).

Every Metaweb has its own profile and settings. These includepermissions governing how Guests and registered users may access andinteract with that Metaweb. By default, unless otherwise specified, anew Metaweb is private and can only be viewed by the admin who createsit. Other setting combinations enable it to be seen, read, and/or editedby “public” or by accounts for particular individuals, or by individualswho are members of particular groups. Permissions are inherited by allKnodes in a Metaweb, but can be excepted on a per Knode level. Allsub-Knodes inherit the permissions of their parent Knode unlessexcepted.

Post/Edit

Posting is the act of adding content to a Metaweb. When posting the userselects the persona they are posting “from,” and the Metaweb(s) they areposting “to.” They must also select a type of Knode to post, or use thedefault Knode for that Metaweb and/or Metaweb section they are postingto.

It is possible to cross-post to any number of Metawebs, althoughpostings will only be accepted by Metawebs for which the current useraccount has posting-permissions. The policies of posting to a particularMetaweb are determined by the admin of that Metaweb. Posting may be openor moderated, and may be free or paid.

The author of a Knode is the default admin for the object. However if anobject is posted into a Metaweb that is administered by someone else,then the administrator of the target Metaweb also receives admin rightsfor the instance of the posted object within their Metaweb (but notnecessarily for other instances of the object in other Metawebs).

All postings that a user creates are objects that live in their account.When they post to a particular Metaweb an instance is created in thatMetaweb (even if it is their own Metaweb). This enables them to changethe master-Knode as a shortcut for changing all the instances of thatKnode wherever they exist, or they can change just particular instanceswithout affecting the master Knode.

Templates and Wizards

A rich ontology of templates for various types of Knodes is provided.Users may configure their own instances of these templates (byshowing/hiding slots and by reordering slots), and they may alsosubclass and enhance these templates (by adding new slots), and they maycreate completely new and custom ontology branches and templates (withintheir namespaces only).

Wizards are also provided to help users quickly setup, instantiate andauthor particular types of Metawebs for common purposes including:

-   -   Content (Home page, Weblog, newsletter, newsfeed, photo album,        catalog, reviews)    -   Group/Team (a group of people and/or other groups and related        resources, discussions, calendars, projects, knowledge, content,        etc.)    -   Project/Task (for managing a project and related resources)    -   Calendar (for managing events over time and related resources)    -   Knowledge base (for creating a generic network of knowledge        about some topic or interest)    -   Trading Post (My offers and request for things)        Agents

Users may create agents that operate on Metawebs.

An agent applies some behavior to some input and produces some output.Agents may take the output of other agents as input.

The most common type of agent is a Subscription. A Subscriptionaggregates content from one or more Metawebs according to rules. Tosubscribe a user must login to their account and create a Subscription.A Subscription specifies one or more Sources to subscribe to, as well asany rules for how to get content (push or pull), and how often, and howto filter the content from the sources, and how to route the content forthe subscription (to my personal Metaweb, to an RSS feed just for me, tomy email address, etc.). Subscriptions can be made to entire Metawebs orto particular Pages or Knodes within them. Subscriptions can also bepiped into other subscriptions (every subscription is a virtual source)to create composite subscriptions. Subscriptions can also be syndicatedinto other Metawebs (true syndication; I can subscribe to particularitems from your Metaweb and pipe that content into my Metaweb, accordingto rules).

Note that Subscriptions, or in fact any other type of Agents, can beturned shared with others, as Knodes themselves.

Other types of common agents include:

-   -   Matching (find Knodes that match a particular existing Knode,        according to a ruleset, and notify the other party and/or me or        take some other action)    -   Searching (look for Knodes that satisfy some rule and notify me        if they are found instantly, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly)    -   Monitoring (track a Knode and let me know if/when it changes)    -   Bidding (make bids automatically on an item I want to buy        according to my rules)

Every user's Metaweb account has a section in it where their agents canbe managed and interacted with.

Search

The Metaweb portal provides for semantic searching across any set ofMetawebs and dimensions via a search interface.

Navigation

The Metaweb Portal has the following navigational structure:

-   -   Metaweb Home    -    Public section        -   Basic Search        -   Advanced Search        -   Join/Login        -   About        -   Help        -   Directory (filterable directory)        -    All Metawebs (registry of Metawebs)            -   By priority (featured, normal)            -   By author            -   By publisher            -   By endorser            -   By access popularity (relative frequency of access)            -   By posting popularity (relative frequency of postings)            -   By ratings (reviews)            -   By date created            -   By last modified date            -   By status (active, expired)            -   By access (public, private, read-only, read-write)            -   By geography (relevant geography to item)            -   By topic            -   By content rating            -   By access terms (free, premium)            -   By posting terms (free, premium)            -   By number of registered users        -    Knodes (directory of all Knodes across all Metawebs)            -   By type            -   By author            -   By publisher            -   By endorser            -   By Metaweb (that Knode appears in)            -   By access popularity (relative frequency of access)            -   By posting popularity (relative frequency of postings)            -   By ratings (reviews)            -   By date created            -   By last modified date            -   By status (active, expired)            -   By access (public, private, read-only, read-write)            -   By administration (unmoderated, moderated)            -   By reputation (how much can I trust it, based on                reputation of author or authors)            -   By geography (relevant geography to item)            -   By topic            -   By content rating            -   By access terms (free, premium)            -   By posting terms (free, premium)            -   By number of registered users        -    Featured Metawebs            -   Music (all about music)            -   Places            -    Countries (all about various countries)                -   Cities (all about various cities)                -   Destinations (places)            -   Sports (all about sports)            -   Business            -    Industries            -    Professions            -   Literature (all about literature)            -   Politics            -   Kids            -   Hobbies            -    Cooking            -    Collecting            -   Technology (A Metaweb about technology)            -   Products (A Metaweb about products)            -    Cameras            -    Computers            -    Software            -    Autos            -   Cultures            -    Religion            -    Ethnic            -    National            -   Lifestyles        -   Special Sections        -    What's New        -    Recent Posts        -    Popular Posts        -    Featured Posts        -    Popular Metawebs        -    Featured Metawebs        -    Ads (like on Google, along the side)    -    Private Accounts section        -   My Account        -    My Metawebs (Metawebs I create or administer or simply that            I read)            -   Default Personal/group Metaweb (that every account                starts with and can author)            -    Content                -   My homepage                -   My weblog                -   My calendar                -   My news                -   My files                -   My offers                -    Products                -    Services                -    Jobs                -    Real-estate                -    For-sale                -   My requests                -   My family (optional)                -   My friends                -   My colleagues                -   My music (that I like)                -   My books (that I like)                -   My products (that I like)                -   My opinions (reviews, editorials)                -   My resume                -   My organizations                -   My causes                -   My interests (topics)                -   My projects                -   My files (that I wrote or share)                -   My ideas                -   My photos                -   My websites            -    Administration interface (if I have permissions)                -   Who can see that it exists                -   Who can admin                -    Who is root                -    Who can moderate/edit                -   Who can read                -   Who can post/write                -   Who can make agents here                -   Who can delete things                -   Who is banned                -   Who has to pay for what, does not have to pay                -   What types are allowed                -   What is the structure of the Metaweb                -   What are the settings for the Metaweb                -   What are the stats for the Metaweb                -   What is the layout/design of this Metaweb            -   Other Metawebs            -    Created by me . . .            -    Not created by me . . .        -    My Knodes (this is a way for me to centrally view and            manage all Knodes—that is either individual master-copies or            instances of Knodes as opposed to Metawebs which are            publications comprised of many Knodes—that I publish or            subscribe to, across all Metawebs that I create or            aggregate)            -   Outgoing            -    (way to admin all Knodes I have posted)            -   Incoming            -    (way to read all Knodes I receive via agents, messages,                etc.)            -   Folders            -    (collections of pointers to Knodes I want to track; can                be created manually by me and/or automatically by                agents/filters)        -    My Agents            -   (way to manage all the agents I have, such as my                subscriptions)        -    My Relationships            -   (way to manage        -    My Personal Info            -   Payment info            -   Contact info            -   Demographics            -   Settings            -   My Identities            -    Identity x                -   Profile                -   Settings            -    Identity y                -   Profile                -   Settings            -   My Stats            -    Usage                -   Reputation/Ratings

While “outward facing” services, such as Google and Yahoo!, focus onhelping you work with what and who you don't know, there are currentlyno services that help you work with who and what you already know, andhave stored on your computer. To remedy this, Hotnode processes yourincoming email and instant messages, email and instant messaging notesyou send to others, as well as messages you send to yourself, such asmemos, to-dos, and calendar events. We help you search what you know; wehelp you work with people you know; we enable you to publish semanticmaterial to particular parties (yourself, individuals, groups). Inshort, we Hotnode helps you manage your stuff.

Hotnode is the next-generation platform for microcontent publishing. Weprovide: next-generation semantic E-mail, Web pages, Weblogs and Wikis,in one easy-to-use framework.

-   -   automated, integrated social networking.    -   access to thousands of semantically-enhanced news services.    -   the ability to manage your digital files better.    -   the ability to do a new kind of marketing and semantic search.    -   automated alerts.    -   better communication, collaboration, and on-line interaction.

We provide a site where members can come and author sematic postingscalled hotnodes, using our Hotnode ontologies. To do this, they fill outthe form for their semantic posting; Hotnode then post-processes thecontent of the form to generate a preview of what their “semanticposting” will look like. Depending on their preferences, Hotnode mayenhance their posting in various ways, for example by automaticallymining it and linking it to various other nodes in their network on oursystem.

Hotnode enhances your email. It blocks spam. It takes notes. It learnsabout your interests. It helps you collaborate with others. It helps youbuy and sell. All of this can be accessed via E-mail, via a Webinterface, via free desktop tools, or via a combination of all of these.

Problem Statement

Currently there are no semantics in blogs or Wikis—their authors havefor example no easy way to assign topics to their postings, or to enablepeople to navigate blog or Wiki content by topic, type, author, or othersemantic dimensions. Furthermore, readers of blogs and Wikis have nocentral portal where they can go to view an alphabetical list of topicsto see what has been posted across lots of blogs. Currently, people useE-mail as a to-do list, to keep track of their friends, for storingaddresses, for sharing files, and as a workflow management tool. YetE-mail was not designed for any of these tasks, and, as a result, is apoor tool for handling them. People who already have blogs need a wayto:

-   -   add more semantics to their postings (i.e. semantic types, topic        taxonomy, defined named slots, and a markup language to use in        their content)    -   add semantic search, navigation and filters to their blog    -   target and market their blog and their postings more effectively        to audiences they want to reach    -   add true threaded discussions to their blogs    -   use their blog for more purposes, for example as their personal        information manager, for collaboration, etc.    -   control the policies of their postings (limited control for        Hotnode users; unlimited control buy our server)    -   enhance their postings. Hotnode can mine their content and        return marked-up version with links to related nodes in our        network)    -   easily add Wiki-like functionality to their blog    -   do classified advertising on their blog. Hotnode lets them post        offers and requests on their blogs and return them an rss feed        for their matches.    -   easily get related content to syndicate into their blog, related        to any posting, or to any topic they cover.

People who don't have blogs need:

-   -   a place to make their blog    -   a free blogging service    -   easy-to-learn (non-geeky) functionality, to get started and use        it quickly    -   maximum self-expressive power: their own choice of formatting        and layout, lots of easy design templates to choose from as well        as make their own    -   help to get discovered: On Hotnode linking via social networks,        topics, issues, etc., and automatic inclusion in directories        with semantic navigation, is not only possible, it's a natural        way of doing things        Solution

While “outward facing” services focus on helping you work with what youdon't know and who you don't know, there are no services that help youwork with what and who you do know. Hotnode can process email messagesthat come through it. This includes messages you send to others,messages others send to you, and messages you send to yourself (at theservice). We help you search what you know; we help you work with peopleyou know.

Hotnode enables anyone to post a semantic weblog to their existingweblog and/or to a next-generation weblog and community we host. So intheir existing blog users can link to the Hotnode taxonomy and ontologyto classify their content, and they can include html in their blog (orany web site for that matter) that provides a semantic navigationinterface to their site; Hotnode indexes their site for themautomatically. This is somewhat equivalent to the way people put the“Search my Site, provided by Google” on their web pages. Hotnodeprovides an API that anyone can use to put semantic search of theircontent into their site.

Hotnode also provides new ways to markup web content semantically sothat Hotnode can do a better job of indexing it, to enable users tonavigate. Hotnode also provides a way for bloggers to make our topicsavailable on their site for navigation, so that people can navigate thecontent semantically within site—generating the listings on the fly.Hotnode provides a sidebar for semantic filtering and navigation thatusers can put into their typelist, or anywhere else in their blog. Ifusers really want the full power of Hotnode, they should to switch topublish their blogs on the Hotnode semantic blogging service, whichmakes all of this even easier. Through Hotnode, users can createsemantic Wiki entries. Hotnode recognizes and parses Wiki syntax inline;If users put in Wiki commands in an email they send out, such as[knowledge management], their Hotnode will create and/or link to ahotnode named “knowledge management” from the appropriate location inthe body text of the hotnode for that email message. If a user forexample writes [biology], Hotnode will make a new hotnode for “biology”(of unspecified type) on their Hotnode and the Hotnodes of recipients,or link to an existing node of same/similar concept, if it is found. Totake another example, a user can type [person: Nova Spivack] and Hotnodewill make a person hotnode or link to an existing person by that name.They can also converse with Hotnode by sending emails with questions, [?friend-of Nova Spivack] for example. Hotnode will reply with a messagecontaining the query results from the Hotnode account, in this examplewith a list of Nova Spivack's friends. Hotnode turns email into asemantic wiki running on the Radar backend. Wiki entries can be private,visible only by the person who authored it (email to self), visible to afew selected recipients (email to a few selected recipients), visible tomembers of a list (email to an email list), or visible to all (email topublic@hotnode.com). When you send a message the resulting hotnodes areshared with the recipients of the message (via their Hotnode accounts).Because Hotnode intercepts messages to/from every user, it can mine themand make a really good search index for each user, hosted on our serverand only accessible by the user to which the information belongs.

We can also give users various other useful views on their data (such aswhat we do in Radar), via the ontology and our semantic search andfiltering.

In addition to the above, Hotnode does automatic social networking:Building a social network by simply analyzing the recipients onmessages, and linking these together into a representation of the socialnetwork that they are a result of. This is a secondary viral feature:Belonging to such a network makes it more likely that a member willsolicit his or her friends to join the network. Hotnode looks at theuser's emails as they come through and builds a social network from themautomatically, based on who they correspond with. The user can thensearch, visualize and communicate using this network. This is totallyautomatic—there is no need to send or reply to “join my network”messages anymore. Hotnode learns just by seeing who talks to who.

Business Model

The main revenue will come from selling premium services and features toenterprises, and to sell the entire backend to enterprises that want torun their own nodes in the network or to run it in-house or for theirprivate communities, customers, etc.

We are going to start by providing a the most powerful hosted bloggingand wiki service on our platform, as well as a portal for our communityof users. We provide semantic blogging, Website and Wiki services toindividuals, groups, communities and organizations. We are the semanticequivalent of the Wikipedia or Everything2 (which we might consideracquiring or close collaboration with). Users get a basic blog and Wikifor free, without ads. We can also provide them with other semanticobjects they can post to their blogs for various types of things. If auser accept ads then they get some additional free features. Users canopt-in to advanced features by subscribing to the Hotnode Pro service($9.95/month) and paying a la carte fees for other optional additions.

We also provide a next-generation semantically enhanced email service.We will provide users with a free POP account. To enable people tocontinue using their current email, we provide several options: First,they can set their current service to forward their email to Hotnode.Second, their Hotnode can be set to retrieve email from other emailaddresses periodically or manually. Third, they can park their domainswith us. Fourth, they can set Hotnode as their email proxy to theirregular ISP. To get a lot of immediate usage, and motivate people to useus instead of their current ISP, we can offer free domain parking, freeemail and free web hosting.

With this setup Hotnode automatically processes any message received byor sent to a user's existing email address, becoming the next-generationISP. We could partner with an existing ISP so that we don't have tobuild the hosting infrastructure. On the other hand we could also do itourselves and either get bought by a big ISP or simply take over andbecome the next equivalent of Earthlink, for example.

Our online Hotnode service can enhance your email, even if you use onlyOutlook or any other email client. That is the primary viral startingfeature. You can send, get, view and even create hotnodes via any emailclient (you can also do it via any web browser, or via Personal Radar).The automatic social networking from email is a secondary viral feature:Once a member belongs to such a network, he/she is more likely tosolicit his or her friends to join Hotnode (see e.g. Plaxo). We allowfree Hotnode accounts to send out only a certain number of messages perday (to block bulk spammers). If you want more you can pay. If anyonecomplains you lose points on your license, and if you lose x numberpoints you go on probation and your message are marked as possibly spam.If you keep messing up we ban you. To create stickiness, Hotnodeprovides aggregated, semantically tagged news from around the net,providing more easily navigatable news than any other service. In thebeginning, Hotnode also mines the Net and automatically creates a nodeabout every Web page, document, person, company, etc. that is found. Wesend out invitations to all to join Hotnode and keep the informationabout them up to date. Our plan results in potentially tens of millionsof users very quickly, and these services are more useful than eitherLinkedIn or Plaxo. The only concern is that by the time we launch peoplemay be wary of using any social networking systems, because they aretired of getting invites all the time from their friends—in which casewe might have a more subtle way of doing things. We have given it somegood initial thought and will continue to refine it.

This is the first step to getting a lot of sites to start using us astheir semantic engine. We provide a central ontology of templates forvarious types of things you can post. Also a taxonomy of nodes fortopics, places, companies, products, events, etc. If we own thetaxonomy, ontology and semantic search and navigation feature of everysite, we own the semantic web—a way to get people to use our portal astheir taxonomy and ontology. Hotnode.com becomes a central portalserving as a directory, search, hosted semantic messaging service,community and marketplace. There are also some compelling applicationsof this to groups/teams. A key is that this is a way to get our platformto a lot of people without requiring any new download—it works withtheir existing tools on day one.

Later we will sell our software to enterprises that want to take suchservices in house. Enterprise Hotnode servers enable organizations tohost their own Hotnode accounts and services on the network.

Customers

We are primarily targeting early adopters of technology, who will wantto use our enhanced email features to improve the way they interact withand use information on-line and off-line. We are also directly targetingpeople who have blogs already (experts), as well as the blogless masses(neophytes). Experts can use us to enhance their existing blogs in manyways. Neophytes can use us as their bloghost. Thirdly, website creatorswill want to use us to enhance their sites with more advancednavigational and search abilities. We are targeting consumers andbusiness individuals equally on these fronts; enterprises will not betargeted specifically in the first phase.

Competition

When we launch, our main competitors will likely include: SixApart(Typepad and Moveable Type), Google (Blogger), Userland, LiveJournal.

Competitive Advantages

-   -   Hosting your blog on our site is the only way to get the full        benefit of our platform    -   We have more features (semantics, targeting, search, filtering,        etc.)    -   You can create any number of blogs for yourself, and for        particular groups you interact with    -   We help you get notices (marketing, cross-posting, syndication)    -   We give you more expressive freedom (more design templates,        widgets to use, etc.)    -   We also give you a built-in wiki (you can create nodes about all        sorts of things)    -   Your blog is part of a community and marketplace (we run a        portal that you are part of)    -   You can use your blog for more things (not just traditional        blogging)    -   publishing info    -   publishing rich photoalbums and playlists    -   as your online PIM    -   for managing projects and tasks    -   for collaborating with groups/teams    -   for sharing your calendar    -   for marketing things    -   for classified advertising    -   for sharing knowledge    -   for sharing files    -   We have a great (optional) desktop tool for posting to your blog        and aggregating from it    -   If you ever want to, you can use our server to host it all        yourself    -   You can allow your friends to cross-post to your blog and you        can cross-post to theirs    -   We generate multiple RSS feeds for your blog (for different        filters of it)    -   We provide a marketplace that does matching of offers and        requests that your post to your blog        Hotnode Offerings

Your Hotnode account provides you with many services, including:

-   -   Proxy services (POP, HTTP)    -   IM address (Jabber)    -   RSS/semantic news publishing and aggregation    -   Reminders    -   Notifications    -   Knowledge capture    -   Knowledge discovery    -   hotnode store and forward    -   Publish and subscribe    -   hotnode synchronization    -   PDA/PIM Sync    -   Personal profile (you can profile yourself)    -   Search    -   Weblog    -   Wiki    -   Listserv (threaded discussion)    -   Calendars & Events    -   Contacts    -   Projects & Todos    -   Notes    -   Messages    -   Web Favorites    -   Lists (you can make lists of anything)    -   Knowledge (books, music, video, software, places, restaurants,        documents, products, services)    -   Reviews    -   Playlists    -   Photoalbums    -   Filesharing    -   Topics directory    -   Matching of offers and requests (commerce)    -   Question answering (you can ask it a question and get an answer)    -   Mail filtering    -   Suggestions (sites you might like, products you might like,        etc.)

We provide some new things users can put into their blog, that use ourserver's API. These include:

-   -   Semantic search box    -   Semantic directory that lets visitors navigate their content by:    -   date/time    -   type    -   topic    -   geography    -   popularity    -   ratings    -   custom filters    -   The ability to define their own custom filters and put them in        as links on their navbar    -   Semantic Marketplace—they can choose marketplace categories to        put on their blog. They and/or visitors can post offers/requests        there. We aggregate that content and look for matches. We email        and/or RSS the matches we find back to the poster according to        their prefs.    -   The ability to create custom RSS feeds that pump content they        want to put into their blog to them    -   Related items (a link that shows any related items to an item,        filtered semantically, from our network)    -   What's new (a list of the newest items from some set of        namespaces: just them, or some community)    -   My friends' posts (posts from blogs of their friends—they have        to tell us what blogs to mine) We provide an optional API that        sites can use to call us directly to register and create nodes        in our network via their own UIs using our XML/RDF templates        etc.

We provide a Dashboard that makes managing addresses and hotnodeseasier, and available off-line.

Joining Hotnode

To join Hotnode you go to the Hotnode website and create an account.When you join, you are asked to set your preferences regarding your‘nodes’ use. You also get a chance to add email addresses for people youwould like to be notified of your new Hotnode account. There are variousways to do this, among them:

A) Upload your email address book to Hotnode and let Hotnode store youraliases. You can then choose who you want to invite to your network.Hotnode will also show you any addresses in your address book for peoplewho are already Hotnode members, and can automatically connect you withthem.

B) Type addresses into forms.

C) Click to get a flat text email from Hotnode with a “change ofaddress” notification that you can Forward to your friends.

When you have created your Hotnode account, several defaultrelationships and subscriptions have already been made for you,automatically:

-   -   Public—A group that lets anyone in, including Guests        (non-members or non-logged in parties)    -   Hotnode—you have a relationship to the Hotnode service that        cannot be deleted    -   Hotnode Members—a relationship to the set of all Gridpost        members    -   Hotnode Relationship Invites—a subscription to accept        relationship invites from Hotnode members    -   Hotnode Messages—a subscription to receive messages from any        members    -   Hotnode Announcements—a subscription    -   Hotnode Calendar—a subscription    -   Hotnode Types—a subscription to the ontology (cannot be deleted)        -   Hotnode Directory—a subscription to the current directory of            channels        -   Hotnode Marketplace—a subscription to the marketplace            directory        -   Hotnode Featured Nodes—a subscription to edited channel        -   Hotnode What's Popular—a subscription to feed        -   Hotnode What's New—a subscription to feed        -   Hotnode Recent Posts—a subscription to feed    -   My Relationships—a group        -   My Contacts—a wizard helps you form relationships with            individuals        -   My Groups—a wizard helps you form and/or make relationships            for one or more other groups . . .        -   My Friends—a wizard helps you make this group and            invite/connect with your friends        -   My Colleagues—a wizard helps you make group and            invite/connect with your friends        -   My Family—a wizard helps you make group and invite/connect            with your friends        -   My Team        -   My Religion        -   My Class        -   My School        -   My Department        -   My Community        -   My Neighborhood        -   My Customers        -   My Suppliers        -   My Partners    -   My Services—a wizard helps you make relationships to nodes for        services you use        -   Job Boards        -   News Services        -   Financial Services        -   etc. . . .            Using Hotnode

The on-line Hotnode service can enhance your email, even if you use onlyOutlook or any other email client. You can send, get, view and evencreate hotnodes via any email client. You can also do it via any webbrowser, or via Desktop Radar.

You can access your Radar account via:

-   -   Web browser    -   Personal Radar    -   Email    -   IM    -   SMS    -   Phone    -   Fax

When a message comes into your Hotnode account, it is archived and thenmined by us. It is automatically linked to any relevant hotnodes in youraccount and new hotnodes may be created based on its content.Furthermore, actions may take place on your behalf via rules in youraccount, and/or via instructions that are embedded in the body of theemail.

All postings have the same requirements: The user needs give a hotnode atype, and optionally specify what other hotnodes it relates to and how,and, finally, who gets to do what with it (including look at, link to,etc.). To post a hotnode from the website, you go to your on-lineHotnode account, you select the type of thing you are writing (memo,notification, alert, etc.), you write the content, you specify whoshould receive it (or to what website it should go if its a blog or aWiki), you set the policies/rules of its content, and you post it (thisprocess is typically going to be iterative). We “post-process” yourentry to create links automatically or semi-automatically. The policiesdictate who can see it, when, and what others can do to it, includingdeletion, display, linking to, copying, etc.

If you are a blogger, you author blog entries on our site and publishthem from there. For this we provide a blogging tool on our site. Youcan also use Desktop Radar, which probably most people will prefer,because it'll typically be more responsive. If you want to preview thesemantic content before it's posted, you can test-post before it ispublished. A blog entry is itself a hotnode because it gets posted as awhole, all at once, with a unique ID and a timestamp. Inside a blogentry hotnode there are references, in the form of semantic links (alsohotnodes), to other hotnodes, which may live inside or outside the RadarNetworks portal. (If they live outside—i.e. if people are not runningour desktop application or a Hotnode server on the blogging site—it'shard to guarantee that they are current and/or valid.)

Hotnode's syntax interpreter is programmable, so users can customize it.For basic consumers we will provide the simplest syntax interpretationby default, and probably very little of the Wild functionality; basicconsumers will just use the basic services: enhanced messages, betterhandling of attachments, hosted semantic search, social networking andspam blocking, etc. Power users will get full parse functionality andprogrammability of their Hotnode account.

Spam Blocking

Once your contacts know your hotnode account, you can start filteringout any mail that has not originated with Hotnode. Mail from Hotnode isnever spam. Hotnode provides trusted mail.

If a non-member sends unsolicited mail to your Hotnode account we do thefollowing:

1. We make them a member and invite them to join before we deliver themessage to you.

2. If they don't join, we don't send the message to you.

3. Once they join, you get a relationship invitation from them in yourhotnode inbox, but the relationship has to be approved by you, unlessthey are already in your email addressbook on Hotnode.

If you use Webmail and cannot change your SMTP, then there are severalworkarounds—one is that when you reply to any message from a hotnodeaccount the reply-to is that hotnode account, so hotnode can interceptthe message. Or you can send the message to your own hotnode but put inthe body [to: nova@radarnetworks.com] in which case your hotnode agentwill send the message on to me via your hotnode. In the worst case youcan simply cc your hotnode account if you want it to get messages. Thisis only an issue for webmail users though. You could also just useHotnodes' Webmail service to send messages.

You can also create hotnodes via the Hotnode Web site, or via IM—aconversational interface where you interact with a bot that representsyour hotnode. So a user can say, “new person ”Nova Spivack” and it canreply, “OK. What is Nova's Street Address?” etc. A user can converse notonly with their own bot but bots representing other people they haverelationships with.

Sharing

One of the new things about Hotnode is that any user can use theirHotnode account to give their friend or colleague a subscription tosomething. For example, I send you the hotnode for my contactinformation. If you accept that hotnode, you will always have my currentcontact information, as long as I update my copy of it to reflect mycontact information correctly. No matter how many of my contacts have mycontact information—they all get updates when I change my local copy.Others can set their account to alert them, on the Web and/or via email,whenever the contact information hotnode changes.

We can also use this to share our calendars. I can send you the hotnodefor my calendar. If you accept it you then get a subscription to mycalendar. Any events on my calendar (hotnodes contained within it), thatyou are allowed to see, will then show up in your copy of my calendar.You can choose to have email notifications sent to you when thingschange etc. You can also synch your palm pilot with my calendar to seemy calendar events on your palm, or with outlook for example.

I can also share files, contacts, todos, and many other things with youin this manner. We both can see the hotnode for the message, but we mayeach see different links from it to other messages in our privatenamespaces.

Listerv

Hotnode provides a listerve facility. Members of a group can use email(or Web interface) to publish information to the group and add hotnodes.Akin to Yahoo Groups, this service lets every member of a group settheir preferences for notification: Is every new hotnode individualemail, sent automatically to the recipient's email address, do theyprefer a daily/weekly digests, or an on-line standard listserv-view?Users can also select to have notification separately from the contentitself via email, RSS, SMS, IM, etc.

Regular messages sent to/from members of a group are automaticallyparsed and mined; any Wiki codes are detected. The messages are turnedinto hotnodes. Then they are sent onwards as enhanced email messages togroup members according to their preferences.

These features make a listserver much more useful—all the interactionstaking place in the group are actually creating a collectiveknowledgebase about everything being discussed.

Policy Management & Security

To authenticate email the owner of a Hotnode account can select from aset of available authentication schemes, including:

-   -   Password: The text [password <my password>) must be included in        the body of my message for it to be accepted    -   Mailback: After a message is posted, a confirmation email from        the server to the poster will have to be sent back to the server        to get permission.    -   PGP: Users can put public key signatures into messages.

The owner of an account can set who is allowed to send them hotnodes andwho is not allowed to do so, in order to prevent spam.

When a user sends a hotnode via their Hotnode account, it is madeavailable to the recipient according to the recipient's preferences,which the recipient can set to automatically accept any and all hotnodesfrom the sender. They can also specify that they have to approve eachhotnode before it is accepted into their collection. If the recipientsdon't have a Hotnode account yet, the system will create one for themand send them an email message inviting them to pick up the hotnode thatwas sent to them, and to configure their new account. This is thus aviral feature.

Hotnode can help protect information from being forward withoutauthorization; we can inhibit or even prevent unauthorized forwarding ofmessages, files and hotnodes.

Here's how:

1. I make a message and send it to you.

2. The message contains lots of hotwords and also links to attachmentson our server. These all link to our server.

3. I designate that the message is for your eyes only when I make it.

4. When you receive it the links work for you and any of your Hotnodeaccounts and associated browsers or IP addresses, etc. If you try toforward it to someone else, using Hotnode as your SMTP, we will not letyou because it is against the policy of that message.

5. If you forward anyway—via another SMTP host that we do not see—and anunauthorized party receives it and then tries to click any of the links,the links will not work for that recipient (we detect that they are anunauthorized recipient).

6. Additionally, the links can have time-expiration keys in them, and wecan use cookies, login challenges, or even IP sniffing, to detectwhether they are authorized. So they can't surf the hotwords and theycan't download the attachments—only those authorized can.

Furthermore—if the unauthorized recipient clicks on anything—theforwarding party will get notified that they forwarded a message tosomeone else against its policy. That happens as soon as Hotnode getsthe click. Further, the author will get notified that the forwardingparty was notified. When you make a document “Eyes Only” we add a footerto it such as “WARNING: This Message is Marked as Confidential and Onlyfor You, by the Sender. Do Not Forward. The Sender Will Be AutomaticallyNotified if This Message is Accessed by Unauthorized Parties.”

When sent via our SMTP the locked message can be intercepted and turnedinto a graphic image that pops up from a link in a new email messagethat launches an applet hosted on our server—it cannot be saved locallyand cannot be forwarded to any unauthorized recipients by any reader.Their only choice would be to use screen-capture to scroll through themessage and get all the content and paste it into a new picture thatthey could send to recipients. While not impossible this would be hardand annoying enough that most people wouldn't do it.

In the case where the recipient does not use us as their SMTP they canstill be prevented or at least inhibited from forwarding to unauthorizedparties in several ways, including:

-   -   include a hidden javascript in the message that reports back to        the owner whenever it is forwarded and viewed, and could even        pop up a warning to recipient (and/or sender and/or owner) if        the message is viewed by an unauthorized party.    -   all the URLs in the message are keyed to the account of the        intended recipient. If anyone else tries to surf one of those        URLs, or get the attachment, it will make them login and will        report the attempt to the owner of the message. This is another        deterrent to unauthorized forwards.

To achieve extremely strict access policies (optional in the premiumpaid version of our service) we actually don't send the body of themessage to recipients as regular email at all—rather, the recipient onlyreceives a hotlink to the body of the message, in a regular emailmessage. They click that link to open the message, which is pulleddynamically from our server. The message appears in a popup or in a Webbrowser. Again, it is keyed only to them. They would have to cut andpaste it into a regular email to forward it on—if they do that it willlook like HTML gook (unless they know how to author HTML email which isnot easy). If they manage to get past that barrier they could forwardthe message—they could even strip out all the HTML so that recipientscan't click on anything (thereby preventing us from tracing).(Ultimately if something is totally decrypted and scrubbed of links itis in the clear and we can't do anything—that's true for all piracy—butat least we can make it really annoying to do that so usually peoplewon't do it.) For people who use our Webmail or desktop Radar (or RadarDashboard or Toolbar) we can extend and enforce policies onto desktop.This way we can for example prevent unauthorized forwards.

Even in cases where people manage to scrub a message, we can still hidea watermark in it using “lexical steganography” whereby we introducesome sparsely distributed hard-to-detect additional adjectives, typos,spelling errors, or prepositions or other parts of speech andpunctuation, spaces, formatting, and hidden text characters etc. Theyare put in innocuously after you send it so that the recipient doesn'tnotice they are there—the email is still perfectly readable. Theseactually code for your identity key. When any client or server ofHotnode gets a message it looks at the pure text to see if there is anylexically encoded watermark in it. If it sees it, we get notified.

We can also watermark every hotnode message to the sender and toreceiver by hiding this cryptographically in the URLs it contains. If arecipient forwards such a message to someone else we can trace who theygot their copy from. We simply map a unique message ID into theencrypted URL key such that when any link in the message is clicked onwe know what copy the link is being called from—so we know whose copy itis (because links have a key that is unique to the recipient). Thereforewe know that when John Doe clicks on any link in that message, that JoeDoe is looking at a particular individual's copy of the message. Wedon't necessarily know that Joe got it directly from that individual—itcould have gone via several intermediaries (and who didn't click onanything and so we can't see them)—but as soon as anyone clicks on anylink in the message we can trace it.

We can also prevent message tampering in a similar way. We can uselexical steganography to encode a checksum of the document into the textitself in a manner that cannot easily be noticed by readers. If thedocument is changed in any way—converted to text-only, sliced and diced,altered, etc.—it won't match the checksum hidden in it. We can see thatand alert you. We can store the checksum in the text itself, and/or upon our server.

The only way around these lexical measures would be to retype thedocument—but even then there is a chance that if you retype it word forword that you are unwittingly inserting a key into it that we canrecognize if the message ever goes through our system. These are premiumfeatures for extreme security.

Hotnode can make a document available one page at a time: Hotnodeintercepts attachments, strips out the first page and sends it to yourDashboard or Desktop Radar. At the bottom of the message there isnavigation for “next page” “previous page” and each page number as wellas “first page” and “last page” and “attachments” as well as any“bookmarks” that the sender created to selected sections of thedocument. So for to get the second page one clicks on a link, at whichpoint a Hotnode Webmail reader is called up which gives full access tothe whole message with Hotnode navigation and full feature set around(via a desktop Web browser). Only problem is if the recipient is offlinewhen you want to read my message—you would only be able to get page 1.One workaround would be to actually provide the whole message and putour page-navigation tool in it to allow for relative hotlinking tosections of the document (a quicker way to navigate within a longemail). But those links would only help the reader, they would notprovide any special security features to the sender. Still it could be anice value added overlay (we are an “email overlay” service of sorts)onto messages.

Account Agent

If I do not use Hotnode as my proxy and neither do you, I can explicitysend you a hotnode via Hotnode, even if you are not yet a Hotnode user.I simply send an email to agent@novaspivack.radarnetworks.com and in thebody of the email message I put [to <your regular email address or yourradar address or my saved alias for you>] (alternatively, if you are amember, I can just Cc your Hotnode address). The agent will see this andsend the hotnode to your Hotnode account and, according to yourpreferences, will also send you an email notification to your regularemail account with a link to the hotnode.

Your account agent can handle commands that you send to it via regularemail as well. Commands have a special syntax such as [command <somecommand> parameters . . . ]. For example, you could say [command search(people with lastname=spivack AND friend-of “Jim”)] or just “[*searchpeople with lastname “spivack” and friend-of “Jim”]—the command resultscome back to you via email as text, and/or with a link to a web view ofthe results.

You could also do triplestore types of queries, like [“Nova Spivack”friend-of which would return all the hotnodes that are linked as“friend-of Nova Spivack.”

Dashboard: Social & Semantic Instant Messaging

After the initial launch of Hotnode we release optional free softwarefor the desktop—enabling anyone to interact with their Hotnode moreconveniently than via a browser. As time goes by we add more features toit until it becomes the full Desktop Radar, which seamlessly integratesthe desktop into your Hotnode.

The Dashboard is initially your address book. It is a jabber client. Itshows you current address and presence of all your contacts. It is aHotnode client and it shows you how much new mail you have at Hotnode(and at any POPs you have too). Hotnode can push news, alerts, etc. toit via Jabber. Also it has a command line interface on it for searching,and even conversing with your hotnode bot, creating new nodes etc. Ithas a pulldown or other easy way to choose type of message to send andget the form. It also reads in your local address books and processesthem and writes back out to them with Hotnode addresses for everyone inthem! Or at least enables you to import a new file into your addressbook if there is no api for writing to it. It also enables you toprofile your self and set your presence easily, and do jabber IM withanyone. You can launch various other apps from it—they are plugins thatwe and others can make. If you “expand” it from dashboard mode tofull-mode you get more of Radar appearing (with additional download tofirst install the expanded feature set, only if you want it).

Ticker

It should be positioned as identity and presence. There may also be“friendsware” features here—for example the ticker. You can post thingsto the ticker and other hotnode users can subscribe to your ticker.Every hotnode user is a feed. You can make tickers by subscribing tothem. You can post to your ticker and they get things. Also, if yousubscribe to Joe's ticker, you get article or picture X that Joe posted.Now it comes onto your ticker and (depending on your prefs for yoursubscription to Joe) when Joe's posting appears on your ticker it canautomatically (or not) be reported to your channel and then appears onthe tickers of all subscribers to you. It's social IM for news articles,pictures, music. You could have things come into automatically even likeRSS you get etc. Also to manually make a new items on the ticker byclicking on it or an empty space in it and a new posting window popsup—you can drag into it, or just draw or type, or paste into it, andthen post. You could also say what type of hotnode it is. Also you canhave alerts sent out to people—like “time for our phone meeting,”etc.—social and semantic IM.

IMPLEMENTATION DETAILS

Goals

We will make it easily for people to create and link to new nodes forany piece of content in their Web site. We also want to enable users tolink from any piece of content to existing nodes in our network. Finallywe want them to be able to embed full or partial metadata for nodesdirectly into their site (in order to effectively host their own nodesto the network on their site). This functionality should be available toall Web site developers, bloggers and Wiki users, as well as emailusers.

In all cases, they will be referring to our central ontology andtaxonomy, using semantic links, and linking to nodes we host. We shouldideally be able to discover that they are doing this (either by anembedded javascript that acts as a webbug to ping us, or by an explicitping or registration they send us, or by brute force datamining of theircontent to look for our tags, or all of the above—see implementationplans below), and subsequently index the content to provide centralsearch, filtering, and other services.

Our approach is to enable the mixture of manual and automatic markup.Our portal will have a healthy dose of interfaces that enable manualsemantic markup. One way to do this is to require a certain amount ofup-front manual markup, and then an optional automatic markup. Ourautomation can also be a function of manual markup: those who put inrich markup will get even more benefit from the automation. That thisprocess will always be iterative because the automatic markup will haveto be reviewed by the author before posting.

Notes

We provide users with reusable HTML items to use to put topics intotheir content, or to designate any given string as a particular type ofthing, or to put links to “related items,” “similar items,” “definitionof this item,” etc. into their content. All of these things link to ourservice which provides value added features to their website or blog.

To do this we make a big taxonomy of topics. Each one has a specialpiece of embeddable html on our server that executes a javascript filethat is generated on the fly.

We also make an ontology of types. Each type has a special piece ofembeddable html on our server that executes a javascript file that isgenerated on the fly.

When you write an article on your blog and you want to categorize tovarious topics, you just put the embedded html for those categories intoyour blog. When the page is rendered it executes the javascript whichpings our server and alerts to your content. We then index the contentof the page that pinged us and associate it with your domain under thetopic domain.

We can do the same thing for types—you can put embedded html around apiece of text to say that it is a “person” for example.

We give you a desktop utility that lets you right-click onto any text inany app and a right-menu pops up and you navigate down to select. Itthen generates the appropriate html for you and inserts it into yourcontent.

What this does is provides a way to markup content semantically, and forus to discover and mine only content for particular things, and for usto then provide aggregated channels, as well as semantic search on theserver end. For end users it gives them a way to get their contentmarked up and found more efficiently.

We also provide a way for bloggers to put our topics into their site, sothat people can navigate their content semantically within site—generatethe listings on the fly. We are providing them with a sidebar forsemantic filtering and navigation that they can put into their typelistor anywhere else in their blog. When using the system users can filterfor only content that has been created by “members” or by “guests” or by“anyone” etc. They could also filter for content created by anyparticular ID or by members with particular rank or ratings in thesystem. In fact, they can filter along any semantic dimension that thereis information about in the system.

When a user clicks on a topic in your blog, a popup opens from ourservice that show on one side, the top items from their blog (that wepreviously indexed) for the topic, and on the other side it shows otherblogs and other postings that are relevant to the topic.

Other sidebar services we could provide include classified advertising(an embedded html expression for “this posting is a job request” or“this posting is an apartment for rent offer” etc.) We can also enableusers to import their blogs into our format.

People might be able to use our utility to annotate other people'scontent with semantics and links to nodes in our network. So forexample, when reading your blog, I could right click on some string inyour content and make a link from it to a node out on the semantic web(a node I created or at least a node that allowed me to link to it).That link would be registered as authored by me, and would connect acertain location in your content to a certain node on the semweb. Whenviewing your site, people with our utility could see any semantics youput into your content, PLUS if they wanted to they could see other linksfrom/to your content that were added by others as annotations.

There are some concerns with the above approach. For one thing, if theembedded html executes a script every time a page is loaded that wouldhave pros and cons. The pro is that it would enable us to track theactivity of every piece of microcontent—enabling us to see what isgetting read the most. On the other hand, it might overload us withpings.

When a user “edits” a node, or creates a node, anything they do ismarked up with xml tags that are ID'd to their account. Users who arenot logged in have read-only access, or could make annotations/changesthat will he tagged as ID'd to “guest.”

Semantic Navigation Box

Provide a “semantic navigation and search” box that people can put intheir websites. We “manufacture” you custom HTML on our site to put intoyour site—after you fill out a form on our site that specifies whattopics and layout you want for your search box. So you then cut andpaste the html we generate for you into your site's navigation so thatit appears on every page. This enables people who visit your site, orread any item of content, to click on the topics you selected from ourtaxonomy as well as any special types or special filters, and get a viewof your site for the selected item—we have previously indexed your siteand so when someone clicks on some feature in our search box on yoursite it calls our index and runs a query and returns a popup or pagethat contains the results. In fact, we can even let you display theresults directly from our API, in your own format if you want (insteadof displaying the results on a page we format for you) as an option.

Adding Metadata to Existing Content

Hotnode provides a way for bloggers and webmasters and other contentproviders to add semantics to their content, in a manner that we canindex. To do this, instead of embedding the javascript html into webpages, it might just be easier to use special custom, nonstandard htmlor RDF in your content. Our service knows how to index and recognizethat metadata. Hotnode makes it really easy for people to add thismetadata to their existing content. The best ways to do this is toprovide an OS utility that enables them to get the metadata menu byright clicking on any piece of content in any app on their computer—thiswill allow them to select the type of metadata they want to make aboutthe thing, and will then insert that metadata at the present insertionpoint in whatever document they are working on. Another way to do itwould be to have a popup or other utility that would enable you toeasily author semantic metadata in our format and link things in yourcontent to it. For example, if you were typing in your blog and youtyped “Nova Spivack” you could then put metadata around it that woulddesignate that as the name of a person and link it to a node for thatperson—your nodes would be hosted on our service—so it would be a linkfrom your blog content to a node hosted by us (regardless of who hostsyour blog)—there might need to be a way to put your css onto nodes wehost for you so they have the same look and feel as your blog.

You could also manually point a link to a particular node or we couldactually suggest nodes to link to by looking at nodes you alreadycreated and/or nodes in communities and topic areas in our network,and/or nodes your friends created to see if there are any matches.

Anyone who is making content on the net should be able to easily linktheir content to our ontology and taxonomy. They should be able toselect some text in whatever document they are authoring and link it toa node on our system—either an existing node or a new node that they canfill out. We also provide them with navigation that they can then putinto their content for providing access to their nodes. Since we makenodes for all their content—for every page and every link they make—weare a better way to navigate and search their sites.

We also allow *other people* to come to your content (while logged in asthemselves, not as you) and select some content and link it to nodes inour network. Those links would be stored in their namespace. So thenwhen looking at a site you could see various layers of semanticmetadata—the layer put there by the author, as well as layers put thereby others.

We could provide a utility, either through our app or maybe even a webbrowser, that is overlaid on the editing screens of existing blog sites,and people use *our* site to edit their data, but we merely act as aconduit between the user and the site. Then we allow them to embed asmuch semantic info as they want, and of course provide the proper markupand send it to the site.

There are different ways one might want to add semantics to a page. Oneway would be to simply markup entities on the page with XML tags fortheir types, which would either create new Nodes for those entities orlink to existing nodes for them somehow. Another way people might wantto add semantics would be to enter the full metadata for a hotnode intoa web page—for example a full contact record—or to just put in themetadata for particular fields such as <price> etc.

Blog & WIKI Functionality

We can provide a richer syntax than current blogging and wiki services,such as:

[new topic: knowledge management]—creates a new hotnode of type “topic”with title “knowledge managment,” and links the hotnode for this emailmessage to the hotnode for that topic with a “related to” link, even ifthere is already an existing hotnode of type topic with that name. Itforces the creation of a new hotnode.

[person Nova Spivack]—creates and/or links to a hotnode of type “person”with first name “Nova” and lastname “Spivack”

[<linkname> <A> <B>]—makes an instance of the link <linkname> betweenhotnode A and hotnode B; creates hotnodes A and B if necessary.

[Website “Minding the Planet” http://novaspivack.typepad.com [topics“knowledge management” “artificial intelligence” “Metaweb”] [slot Notes“This is a cool site. You should read it”]

We can make this syntax even easier and more natural.

So I can use the Radar on-line service to send myself (and/or to sendothers) notes from any email program, and these notes will be saved andinterpreted into a knowledge network on the appropriate Radar nodes.

When a new hotnode is created via email, depending on my prefs, my botcan send me an email with a link to the hotnode and/or the HTML form forthe hotnode, so that I can immediately fill it out. Or I can just waitand fill it out later.

Also, attachments are handled intelligently. A separate hotnode isautomatically created for every attachment and the hotnode for the emailmessage is linked to the hotnode for the attachment by a “hasattachment” link.

In addition the mining agent can recognize and mine certain types ofattachments like vcards, ical, standard documents types, RSS, etc.

Every e-mail that is sent to you by the system should contain a set oflinks along the bottom of the message for quick reference, including:Help (gets you help) Home Undo (undoes whatever the last command was)etc. . . .

You can also put [ignore . . . some text . . . ] to cause the agent toignore some text. Ignored text will not be indexed and no hotnodes willbe created about or from it.

My Hotnode has a UI that is similar to a weblog—That is I and othervisitors to it can navigate and search it, just like a blog or any othertype of site. But if a particular user has access privileges they canalso create new items on my hotnode, or edit items, etc. Usually theadmin/owner is the only one who can create new hotnodes. Unless it is agroup hotnode, in which case there might be one admin but many peoplewith authoring and editing permissions. Some people could just author,others could just edit, others could be allowed to author and edit. etc.So there's more policy controls on items than a typical wiki, but it canbe as open as a wiki too if the admin allows it.

It's easy to create new wiki nodes—which are essentially new postings.You can do it via the web interface, or via email, or IM, etc.

There are a bunch of default “Views” that you can provide on yourHotnode. Every Hotnode must have at least a homepage for that node thatthe public sees (unless it's a hidden Hotnode), and must have at leastan Admin page that the admin can see.

Other sections that can be optionally added into your hotnode include:

-   -   Weblog view (show items posted to “Weblog” by time, and archive        anything older than x days, weeks, etc. in archive links—every        element of my blog is a chunk that I can add in or take out very        easily in my Typepad Control Panel.    -   Wiki view (navigate items by node tree structure, starting from        a root node)    -   Bliki view (navigate items by node tree structure, where every        node is a weblog that lists anything posted to it        chronologically)    -   Sitemap view (I can define the preferred navigational structure        of my site and make a map)    -   Directory—the complete directory navigation system    -   Authors directory—articles in your node listed by author    -   By date    -   By popularity (cumulative number of hits per posting)    -   By activity (items ranked by volume of hits in last n hours)    -   By type (ontology types)    -   By rating (using our rating scale)    -   By cited URLs directory—branch that lists items by URLs they        cite (each URL is a category)    -   By cited domains    -   By related people (by names of people occurring in your content)    -   By related companies    -   By related places    -   By referring URL (we look at trackbacks and make a directory of        sites that refer to your site, under which we list for each        referring site what items on your site they point to)    -   My writing    -   My offers    -   My requests    -   by related products    -   by related services    -   by related events    -   by related topics    -   by my friends (the categories are people you name as friends,        any articles posted by them or by you to them are listed for        each)        Example Usage—Change of Email Address

I am a member of Hotnode. I send a message to Jim's regular emailaddress and Jim is not a Hotnode member yet. On this message I also CcKris, who may or may not be a Hotnode member (either case will work).

Jim gets the regular email message I sent him via his regular ISP. Healso gets a Hotnode version of the message I sent him; and he gets anInvitation message from my Hotnode account (all of this because Hotnodeintercepted my message to him via my SMTP settings). This invitationmessage says:

To: jim@jbrix.org

From: Nova Spivack <nova@novaspivack.hotnode.com>

Subject: Urgent: My E-Mail Address Has Changed—Please Update YourAddress Book Now!

Hi Jim, I've changed my email address to nova@novaspivack.hotnode.combecause it enables me to do amazing new things with my email.

Please only use this address from now on when you send me email for anypurpose.

Please update your email address book now and don't use my otheraddresses anymore.

Also, I've created a new Hotnode account for you so you can see what itdoes, and so we can communicate in a smarter way. There is alreadyinformation there that I've created for you. Click here to visit yournew account and set your preferences!

Once you get your Hotnode account, you also get a free Hotnode addressthat I can send messages to. This address then forwards what I send youto any address you want, or you can pick up messages in Hotnode'swebmail interface.

By the way, this message, and the one you just got a minute ago, weregenerated by my Hotnode.com account. Hotnode is the future of email. Itmakes e-mail smarter, easier to search and manage, and more useful. Andthat's just the beginning! It will change your life. Try it out, it'scool!

1. Move your mouse over nouns in this message—you'll see that some ofthem are “hot”—you can click them and—surf to your Hotnode account tosee the linked related information.

2. Also you can see there are links in this message that are visibletoo—you can use those to surf to related information as well.

3. Finally, at the end of this message, below, there is yourpersonalized Hotnode menu with shortcuts you can use to quickly accessyour Hotnode account and interact with me in new ways.

Please remember to change your address for me to my Hotnode.com addressfrom now on. And also, please join my Hotnode network so we can use thistogether. Click here to try it and join now!

Sincerely,

Nova Spivack

Users can also keep their old email address, in which case Hotnode actsas a forwarding address. People can send to a new address via Hotnode(users want Hotnode to intercept their messages to others even if theyare not members of the Hotnode service). If they are members it doesn'tmatter because Hotnode intercepts their outgoing mail, but if they arenot members then it's an issue—unless users choose Hotnode as theirprimary mail client (web or desktop). In that case we can interceptwhatever they send to others (even if they are not members and others donot change their POP account—Hotnode can intercept in software). Thereis actually a rather complex matrix of different scenarios that we haveto cover. If all the users care about is sending outgoing messages andhaving replies to them come via Hotnode, then nobody has to changeaddresses because Hotnode can do that transparently.

Mining Your Web Browsing at Hotnode

You can use your Hotnode account as your HTTP proxy. By doing this, youraccount will save the history of every URL you look at and will makehotnodes for them, and mine them. Later, when you search the Web you cansearch only the sites you have visited previously, or the whole Web.Mining the sites you look at is a powerful way to teach the system.There would probably be a need for a popup window (html or Java) on yourdesktop—or just a toolbar in your IE for turning “HTTP mining on/off” sothat when you can select whether your browsing gets mined and hotnodesget created in your Hotnode account.

Mining/Browsing P006 CIP

A method is described in which browsing activities and information aboutthe web pages, including their content, is monitored, mined, and turnedinto rich representations used to create a knowledge networks, whereininterconnections represent semantic relationships between theinformation collected. This can be done locally on the user's computingdevice and on a remote server.

When the mining and knowledge network generation is done locally on theuser's computing device, a monitoring program is used to capture all Webpages, URLs and other Web material that the user interacts with, as wellas the content of the Web pages visited, and in the background, storethem separately from the browser that is being used. The URLs andmetadata on the content are stored in the system long enough for thesystem to mine the material content, using an ontology and knowledgebase which enables entity detection, entity and free-form textclassification, etc. This information is then connected using semanticrelationships to similar and related representations which have beencreated in the past, using semantic relationships. To set preferences inthis system, the monitoring program is fed with information about theuser (name, address, age, etc.) and preferences, both of which aresupplied by the user up-front.

When the mining and knowledge network generation is done remotely, theuser designates an on-line service to be an intermediate step in thebrowsing. This can be done by setting the service as a proxy in thebrowser, or by using a frame-based interface which puts a separatenavigation frame around the visited web pages. When the user navigatesthe links, the on-line service intercepts the pages navigated andperforms operations that result in semantic markup of the navigatedpages. An account is created with the online service up-front, where theuser provides personal information and sets his/her preferences. Tocontrol the various features of the mining mechanism, a pop-up window(html or java) on the desktop, or a toolbar in the browser, allows forturning “Mining on/off” as well as setting other preferences, so thatthe user can control directly whether their browsing gets mined andsemcards get created.

The user's Web-browsing behavior is also captured semantically for eachWeb page visited, Web site visited, document downloaded, etc.(collectively called “Web interactions”). For example, the precise timea user clicks on a Web page is recorded and the length of time the userviews the page is recorded. This information is turned into a viewingpattern (see below) which can then be used to infer similarity betweenotherwise dissimilar or unrelated web pages. For example, a page withcertain content X can be inferred to be more strongly related to a pagewith certain content Z than would otherwise be expected based strictlyon content, however, based on timing of Web interactions. Throughanalysis of the duration that the pages were viewed for, and theproximity in time within which they were viewed, a strongerrelationships may be inferred. This stronger implied or inferredrelationship can be used to add to the user's knowledge network.

A viewing graph is defined as a collection of semcard nodes, where eachsemcard is a node in the graph. Each node contains a collection oftimestamps representing, among other things, the time at which it wasloaded, the duration for which it was viewed, the duration for which itwas in the background in the browser, the time at which it wasabandoned, the duration for which it was cached in the browser, etc.,along with the page's URL and optionally one or more semantic links toother information, the links specifying that node's relationship to thisother information. The other information can be either nodesrepresenting Web pages or other documents represented by semcards.

This allows queries to be mapped onto viewing patterns, or randomcollections of semcards representing Web pages and Web interactions. Forexample, a query can be constructed for requesting all semcards whichrepresent Web pages that were viewed in the last two days and relatestrongly to a specific topic Z. Another example is a query that requestsall semcards which represent documents which are related to any semcardsrepresenting Web pages which relate exclusively to topic X.

In additions to queries, a special browsing tool can enable simplertypes of queries, embodied as browsing actions, to be expressed, wheresequences of filters, correspond to sequences of browsing actions, getsequentially applied to the semcard collection. Such a tool can be apop-up window, a special toolbar installed in the browser, extensions tothe browser's menus, or a plug-in that enhances the browser in similarand other ways.

The user can set preferences to the behavior of the mining. Among thepreferences are (a) amount of automation, or how thorough and extensiveit should be (with settings e.g. high, medium and low), (b) thresholdfor certainty of a given semantic relationship for human disambiguationto be requested by the system, and (c) amount of automateddisambiguation (e.g. high, medium and low). These three (a, b and c)preference settings are inter-dependent, namely, a constrains b, and bconstrains c, such that this relationship always holds: a>b>c. Thisinterdependency can be reflected in the user interface in various ways.One solution is to allow the user to only set one at a time and have theothers be modified after a setting for it has been chosen; a bettermethod is to dynamically and automatically change the others as one ofthem is modified, and show this change visually by movement of slider orother kinds of appropriate widgets.

Another preference setting determines privacy, i.e. whether thebrowsing, mining, semantic relationships, and other features, arevisible to other individuals or groups.

Another preference setting determines whether the automatic linking isonly to be done with the user's own semantic information or whetherlinks to information created when should also be created. If the userhas set their sharing preferences to e.g. “friends”, any browsing doneby the user will be related semantically and automatically (orsemi-automatically in the case of human dis-ambiguation) to thoseindividuals that the user has designated as “friends”. This will thenenable the user to see

The content of Web pages and sites is turned into semantic informationvia standard data mining mechanisms and natural language processing, asknown in the art. The result is turned into semcards, using anunderlying ontology. In addition to containing summaries and detailedsemantic markup of the content of Web pages, downloaded documents, Websites, etc., every semcard contains information about its author,time-related things such as time of creation, modification, addition,and sharing history, etc. It also contains policies pertaining to thesefeatures. In addition to this automation, users can manually modify, addand delete information, semantic links, classification, etc. that hasbeen created for them by the system.

RN-P007CIP (Business Method Patent)

1. Business Method for Building a Model of the World Through Analysis ofOn-line Information

-   -   Using Wikis, listserv, Web pages, dictionaries, encyclopedias,        geographical resources, and related content to build a knowledge        network, as a way to bootstrap a semantic model of the world,        and get people started using semantic technologies    -   using semcards mined form the Web and constructed by hand to        build a model of the world that minors documents, databases,        web-pages, people, projects, etc. and their real relationships        in the world    -   as an intermediate, uniform representation of this information,        semcards afford both automatic and human creation and editing of        said information

The prior art allows users to add to existing knowledge bases, such asonline encyclopedias, for example, Wikipedia.com. At sites such as this,a user can add content about a particular topic to existing public Webpages which then become part of the body of content for that topic. Thepages are publicly available at the Wikipedia, or similar Web site, andsubsequent users can then continue to add to the body of content.

The present invention is a method allowing a user to add a semantic Webpage to a body of content, such as Wikipedia, where the semantic pagecan have various levels of privacy and sharing. The method also allowsthe user to manually add a semantic Web page using a user interface to abody of content regardless of the format, type or source of the content.

The method entails mining of content, transforming the content intosemcards, and storing the semcards in a knowledge network. This mining,transformation and storing of semcards are done regardless of the type,source, or format of the content. Precisely what is mined can bedetermined by the semantic ISP. For example, an open directory of a datasource can be mined or the entire online data source can be mined, orthe source and directory can be mined. The semcards that are the outcomeof the mining are stored in a network of semcards, thereby incorporatingthe semantic attributes of the content into an existing knowledgenetwork.

The invention allows a user to add semantic pages to a body of contentthat does not have any semantic features. The pages can be set to havevarious levels of privacy, from completely private to completely public.A user can keep the semantic pages she adds quasi-public/private bysetting sharing and security preferences for those pages. This privacycan also be time-dependent; a page can be available to some users atcertain times and not others.

The present invention allows a user to utilize this user interface to“manually” add and remove semantic relationships from private web pages.This user interface allows access to all parts of the knowledge network.The knowledge network is accessible both by automated processes andmanual manipulation by users.

1. Business Method for Building a Model of the World Through Analysis ofOn-line Information

-   -   Using Wikis, listserv, Web pages, dictionaries, encyclopedias,        geographical resources, and related content to build a knowledge        network, as a way to bootstrap a semantic model of the world,        and get people started using semantic technologies    -   using semcards mined form the Web and constructed by hand to        build a model of the world that minors documents, databases,        web-pages, people, projects, etc. and their real relationships        in the world    -   as an intermediate, uniform representation of this information,        semcards afford both automatic and human creation and editing of        said information

The prior art allows users to add to existing knowledge bases such asonline encyclopedias. At sites such as this, e.g. Wikipedia.com, a usercan add content about a particular topic to existing public Web pageswhich then become part of the body of content for that topic. The pagesare publicly available at the Wikipedia, or similar Web site, andsubsequent users can then continue to add to the body of content. Thiscontent is not semantic, and thus does not provide semantic searchfeatures, automatic processing based on semantics, or other featuresrelated to the content being semantically tagged.

The present invention is a method allowing a user to add a semantic Webpage to a body of content, such as for example Wikipedia. The methodalso allows the user to manually add a semantic Web page to a body ofcontent regardless of the format, type or source of the content, throughthe use of a special user interface.

The invention allows a user, using an ontology, to add semantic pages toa body of content that does not have any pre-existing semantic features.The pages can be set to have various levels of privacy, from completelyprivate to completely public: A user can keep the semantic pages sheadds quasi-public/private by setting sharing and security preferencesfor those pages. Privacy can be set to be time-dependent; a page can beavailable to some users at certain times and not others.

This user interface allows access to all parts of the knowledge network.Using this user interface to “manually” create, modify and removesemantic relationships from private web pages, the present inventionallows a user to create a knowledge network. The knowledge network isaccessible both by automated processes and manual manipulation andviewing by users.

The present invention provides a method that can supply users withpre-made semantic content, for immediate benefits of all semanticfunctionalities. To provide users users with pre-existing semanticmarkup of on-line material, a semantic service provider willautomatically process pre-existing on-line content and turn it intosemantically-enhanced content, where all benefits of semantic markupwill be available to the user. The method entails mining of content,transforming the content into semcards, and storing the semcards in aknowledge network. This mining, transformation and storing of semcardscan be done regardless of the type, source, or format of the content.The semcards that are the outcome of the mining are automatically linkedto a network of semcards, thereby incorporating the semantic attributesof the content into an existing knowledge network.

This affords users with all the benefits of a semantic representation ofthe content. For example, an article published on-line by a on-linepublisher is processed by the present method. This will identify andmark the article's various parts, such as author, heading andsub-heading, body text, Web links, pictures, keywords, and otherspecifics of the article, and produce a semcard for it. A user whohappens to find the article on the on-line publisher's website, can usefor example the title of the article or the author's name on thesemantic service provider's Web site to find the semcard for thearticle. The semcard will be connected to a knowledge network viamultiple semantic links to various other semcards; these links can befollowed to find the content of these other semcards. For example, agroup of users may have provided their comments on the article; thesecomments can be viewed by doing a query for all semcards of type“critique” which are linked to the article's semcard by the semanticlink “about”. Alternatively, the user could have gone directly to thesemantic service provider and found the article there.

Precisely what is mined is decided by the semantic service provider. Forexample, an open directory of a data source can be mined, or the entireonline data source can be mined, or the source and directory can bemined. Alternatively, if the on-line publisher collaborates with thesemantic service provider. In this case a link to all the semcards forthe article could be available directly in the on-line Web page for thearticle on the publisher's site. In this case the user does not have touse the title or author of the article to find the semcard for it, butcan follow those links directly to the semcard for the semantic contentprovider.

In an alternative setup, the on-line publisher is the semantic serviceprovider. In this case articles do not exist both as standard Web pagesand semcards, but rather, all articles are published only as semcards.

The method for mining news, wikipedia content, and other material, is asfollows:

1. Profile target to be mined by making models of typical layout, keystructural features, predicted content area, etc. to build semi-staticprofiles that dictate gross features and identify content areas. Thisstep is done mostly manually.

2. Link all concepts in all profiles to ontology, where possible. Thisstep is done manually.

3. Develop analysis rules on to work with profiles. Rules includecomparing analyzed content to existing semcards. This step is donemanually.

4. Run analysis. This step is automatic. This step can be expanded intotwo algorithms—see algorithms described for mining free-form text andwiki content.

5. Publish the semcards created from process for human interaction, sothat users may edit, change, copy, delete, extend, etc. the semcards andthe semantic links created by the process.

By first selecting reasonably well-structured data to be profiled andanalyzed, such as Wikipedia.com, a solid foundation of reasonably cleanknowledge networks can be built up step by step, each subsequent datasource analyzed will benefit from prior semcards created, allowingincreasingly less structured data sources to be processed as timeprogresses.

2. Business Method for Making Email Semantic by Automatic On-lineProcessing

-   -   Attacking the sharp usability curve of learning about semantic        concepts by putting semantic features into email in an        easy-to-use way

The present invention enables automatic semantic mining of content sentby a user. This mining is done without requiring any actions or specialediting by the user, such as inserting special characters or identifyingterms or phrases as potential semantic objects. In one embodiment, theuser has a semantic email account or some type of account with asemantic service provider or semantic ISP. In another embodiment, theuser keeps the same normal, non-semantic e-mail account but adjustsmailbox settings so that mail received and sent are processed by thesemantic service provider.

Users of the system sign up for an account with the on-line service. Theaccount enables them to set preferences regarding the automatic analysisof their email. The semantic service provider processes their incomingand outgoing e-mail, creating a set of semcards representing the emailitself, and concepts referenced in the e-mail. The service provider doesthis in the user's account by the use of an ontology and naturallanguage processing techniques. In this manner, no intervention isrequired of the user (other than a few initial set-up steps such asdescribed above, if an existing e-mail account is being used). Using thesystem the user composes e-mail in the manner she would normally composean e-mail. However, when the e-mail is sent it is treated as a semantice-mail. The novel aspect here is that the user does not have compose thee-mail in a different way to have the e-mail semantically processed.When the semcards have been created, they are automatically linked toother previously defined semcards in the user's account, enlarging theuser's knowledge network.

Users can list their private and business contacts in their account,either by providing such information by hand or by uploading theiraddress book into the system. Sets of different preference settings canthen be associated with separate (named or unnamed) groups of contacts,enabling differential treatment depending on who the user communicateswith. For example, a group called “friends” may have certain settingsfor how entries from/to them should be formatted for viewing. The systemprocesses the addressees of all emails to infer who is communicatingwith the user about what, and vice versa, as well as inferring with whomthe user has relationships, what kind of relationships those are, andwhat projects they relate to. Emails are then linked to those inferredprojects. The user can later correct any mistakes that the system mayhave made in such inferencing.

In another embodiment, the user can instruct directly that certain wordsor phrases in an e-mail be transformed into semcards. The level orfrequency that the user explicitly demarcates which words in an e-mailshould be mined semantically can be used to determine the level ofmining that the ISP needs to do for e-mail sent by that user. This levelof processing is a preference set in the user's account with thesemantic service provider.

For example, the user can set a preference for minimal, medium, or heavymining of her e-mail by the semantic ISP. If the user prefers to insertsa large number of semantic markups in the e-mail, minimal mining may beappropriate to reduce processing by the ISP. The preference may beappropriate for more sophisticated users or users already with semanticcapabilities. Similarly, if the user does no marking, such as in theembodiment described above, she may set a preference for heavy mining sothat the ISP will maximize mining of the e-mail, thereby doing most ofthe semantic “heavy lifting.”

Another important novel aspect of the present invention is that thesemantic service provider uses an ontology to create semcards from thecontent of the e-mail. The ontology is used to connect or relateconcepts identified in the email, either automatically or via theuser-specified markup, to an existing knowledge network. When the userdoes not insert any mark-ups and the service provider automaticallycreates the semcards, the ontology is used by the service provider todetect references to known concepts in the email, make furtherinferences about relationships between these concepts, and link theminto a knowledge network. The knowledge network can be based oninformation from just the user, from the user and those with which shehas relationships, from anonymous yet relevant users, or from the wholeworld.

Automatic creation of semantic social networks is done by collectingemail addresses from the user's emails. These emails are then matchedagainst users in the system, to find matches. When an email addressemployed by the user is found to be that of another user in the system(i.e. a user who has an account with the service provider), semanticlinks are created between the semcard representing those two users. Eachlink created is of a separate type. Depending on other factors,including the content of the emails exchanged, and the number of emailsexchanged, these types include types such as “friend”, “colleague”,“relative”, “conversants”, with the last type being the most generic. Totake the example of the “conversants” link type: The link is createdbetween the user and another person when they have exchanged at leasttwo emails, where the second email was a response to the first. The linkrepresents the time of the exchange (time of sending, time of reading,both emails), as well as who made the link, and when. In the case ofautomation, the unique identifier of the automatic process is used asthe author of the link.

Algorithms

1. Run email through a spell checker—fix any potential spelling errors.Give score for each spelling correction based on certainty.

2. Run email through a grammar checker—identify places with potentiallymissing referents.

3. Infer/propose referents for where there are potentially missingreferents. Give score for certainty of each proposed referent.

4. Compare words and phrases against known words and phrases, stored ina dictionary, to identify entities and concepts.

5. Relate identified words and phrases from last step to an ontology;score all such relations with a certainty value.

6. If necessary, redo steps 1 through 5 based on information produced sofar.

-   -   For example, similarities between a phrase in the email and a        phrase in the dictionary can help correct spelling mistakes not        caught first time around.

7. Run rule patterns from a rule-book on the email, to detect patternsindicative that certain concepts, as stored in the ontology, arepossibly being referenced.

8. Give all detected patterns from last step a certainty value.

9. If necessary, iterate by going back to 3, redoing any stepsnecessary, based on information produced so far.

-   -   For example, concepts revealed by rule pattern analysis could        result in new inferred referents.

10. Give all patterns from last step a certainty score depending on howmany of the preceding steps support them, as well as how well they fitwith other patterns detected.

11. Remove all patterns from last step with a score that falls below acertain threshold.

12. Create semcards for all concepts that remain; create semantic linksbetween the new semcards and old semcards according to the user'spreferences or default settings; link new semcards to places in theemail where they are mentioned and/or to the menu created in the nextstep.

13. Create semantic menu and put into the email.

-   -   Semantic menu allows information access to semcards related to        several dimensions found to be important to the email, as well        as according to the user's preferences. For example, a menu        could allow access to related emails along semantic dimensions        chosen, such as time, topic, type of attachment, etc.

Step Details

Comparison, step 4: Three-part comparison: Boolean comparison, returnsTRUE if words match with a large dictionary; key-word matching to wordsand phrases that have designated roles, meanings, etc., to a certaindomain; and comparison to semcards created for and by this user earlier.

Certainty value, step 5: Computed based on relatively simple word- andphrase-matching to ontological concepts, and semcards created for and bythis user earlier.

If necessary, step 6: Using a measure of cohesiveness at the grammaticaland semantic levels, along with_a set threshold, tuned using corpora ofemails.

Certainty value, step 8: Computed based on estimated distance fromconcepts in ontology. The larger the distance, the lower the value.

If necessary, step 9: If a certain threshold for the average of allcertainty values in step 8 is not reached. Threshold is tuned in thesystem over time.

Certainty score, step 10: Computed using a summarization algorithm thatcombines scores from each step.

Threshold, step 11: Tuned using corpora of emails.

0. Receive Email

1. Detection

1.1. PRE-PROCESSING: Check spelling, grammar, ‘tokenizing’, etc., of ema1.2. DETECT: Detect new concepts using existing semcards, rule patterns,1.3. SKETCH: Create new preliminary semcards from new concepts.

2. Matching

2.1. Are there any existing semcards, created or modified automaticallycreated or modified manually by user, that can help further analyze theor disambiguate between conflicting preliminary semcards, or help detectgo to step 3. Otherwise go to next step.

2.2. Are there any existing semcards, created automatically for users wior has had, a relationship, or were created manually by said users, thatanalyze the preliminary semcards, or disambiguate between conflicting prhelp detect new concepts? If yes, go to step 3. Otherwise go to nextstep 2.3. Are there any existing semcards, modified by users with whichthe u relationship, that can help further analyze the preliminarysemcards, or conflicting preliminary semcards, or help detect newconcepts? If yes, g go to next step.

2.4. Are there any existing semcards, created by other users, that can hpreliminary semcards, or disambiguate between conflicting preliminary senew concepts? If yes, go to step 3. Otherwise go to next step.

2.5. Are there any existing semcards, modified by other users, that canthe preliminary semcards, or disambiguate between conflictingpreliminary detect new concepts? If yes, go to step 3. Otherwise go toStep 3.3.

3. Solidification

3.1. SELECT. Use existing semcards identified in Step 2 to direct which“solidified”.

3.2. LINK. Use existing semcards identified in Step 2 to direct the creanew solidified semcards and existing semcards.

3.4. FINALIZE. Have enough semcards and semantic links been created forto Step 4. If not, go to next step.

3.3. Have all sub-steps in Step 2 been tried? If not, go to Step 2.Other

4. TERMINATION: Discard all non-solidified semcards and terminateprocess

3. Method for Semantic Markup in Free-form Text for Providing Access toKnowledge Networks

-   -   CIP to the SEMCARD app    -   syntax that enables markup of text, giving instructions for        post-processing of the material, including making links to        semcards and creating new semcards    -   syntax, scoping, connection to semantics, preferences        Problem

Users of Email, Wikis and listservs are currently not able to accesssemantic services such as those described by the semcard technology.This results in impoverished functionality, where the lack of richinterconnections between information prevents efficient classification,storage and retrieval of information. Even for those using simple emailclients, Listserv or Wiki technologies, a system which allowed access tosemantically enriched information via such primitive tools could improveproductivity and result in more efficient use of information.

Solution

We describe an on-line service that can enhance email, Wiki, blog andlisterv entries with semantic functionality in two main ways, byapplying a special free-form text analysis processing system. First, byautomatically analyzing emails sent via the on-line service, and second,by allowing syntactic markup in the free-form text of the email. Withsyntactic markup, the system can do a better job of analyzing thefree-form text. With syntactic markup, users can send, get, view andeven create semantically enhanced messages via any email client, and anyWiki and blog composing tools; it can also be done via any web browser.

For the sake of brevity, the term “entries”, in the remainder of thisdiscussion, should be read in the most general sense as referring tofree-form text intended for various purposes, including email messages,Wild pages, blog postings and Listserv entries.

Users of the system sign up for an account with the on-line service. Theaccount enables them to set preferences regarding the automatic analysisof entries and markup syntax. Users can also list their private andbusiness contacts, either by providing such information by hand or byuploading their address book into the system. Sets of differentpreference settings can then be associated with separate (named orunnamed) groups of contacts, enabling differential treatment dependingon who the user communicates with. For example, a group called “friends”may have certain settings for how entries from/to them should beformatted for viewing.

When an entry is posted, the system turns it into a semcard, withinformation about the poster's identity, display preferences, andautomation rules, derived from the user's account information, wherethis data is stored. The content of the message is then analyzed. If itcontains no special markup the system will try to automaticallyrecognize terms, concepts, entities mentioned, etc. in the entry, andrelate these with semantic links to other semcards related to these.

This automatic analysis is done according to the instructions set in theuser's preference settings. If the entry contains syntactic markup, itis analyzed according to the rules of the syntax, and semantic links andsemcards are created based on the specifications found in the markup.

When the system sees markup, such as for example [knowledge management],it will link to a semcard named “knowledge management” (referencing aparticular node in an ontology representing the concept of knowledgemanagement) from the appropriate location in the body text of thesemcard for that email message. If no such semcard exists, it willcreate one automatically. To take another example, a user can type[person: Nova Spivack] and Hotnode will make a new person semcard, orlink to an existing person semcard describing a person with that name.

Users can also interact with the system by sending emails withquestions, [? friend-of Nova Spivack] for example. The system will replywith a message containing the query results from the user's account—inthis example with a list of all semcards of type person who satisfy theconstraint to be listed as “friend-of” Nova Spivack. To do this, thesystem creates a special “results” semcard that organizes the results ofthe query for the user (again, according to their preferences as set inthe account). This results semcard is semantically related to the entrywhich contains the instructions for doing the query, in the form of a“resulted-from” semantic link.

Conversational interaction with the system can be conducted in real-timevia instant messaging. In this case the system responds like a “bot”, orautomatic conversant, and may be enhanced with the ability to parsefree-form natural language.

Users can control the visibility of their semcards created from entries.Semantically enhanced entries can be visible only to the person whoauthored it (posted to self only), visible to a few selected recipients(posted to a few selected recipients), visible to members of a list(posted to an email list or listserv), or visible to all. This can beachieved in various ways, for example, by posting it to public listervor cc-ing the posting to a public email address at the on-line service.

For example, typing [begin-sharing:public] Nova Spivack [end-sharing] ina free-form email will make the semcard for the concept represented bythe word “Nova Spivack” publically viewable by anyone who receives theemail, by following a link put into the email by the semantic processingsystem.

When a user posts a message, the resulting semcards are shared with therecipients of the message (via their accounts). Because the on-lineservice intercepts entries to/from every user, and turns it into asemcard, it can create a superb search index for each user of their ownmaterial. This index is hosted at the on-line service; it is onlyaccessible by the user to which the information belongs. With suchindexing, users can create various default views, as well as customviews, on their own data, through semantic search and filtering.

[new topic: knowledge management]—creates a new hotnode of type “topic”with title “knowledge managment,” and links the hotnode for this emailmessage to the hotnode for that topic with a “related to” link, even ifthere is already an existing hotnode of type topic with that name. Itforces the creation of a new hotnode.

Examples of Markup Syntax

[begin blogentry “Minding the Planet”] HELLO [end blogentry]—tells thesystem that the content between the two ‘entry’ markers (“HELLO”) shouldbecome an entry in the blog named “Minding the Planet”. If the second‘entry’ marker is omitted, anything in the entry following the firstmarker will be included as content.

[person Nova Spivack]—creates and/or links to a hotnode of type “person”with first name “Nova” and lastname “Spivack”

[<linkname> <A> <B>]—makes an instance of the link <linkname> betweensemcard <A> and semcard <B>; creates semcards A and B if necessary.

[begin comment-on] [blog “Minding the Planet”] This is a cool blog! [endcomment-on]—tells the system to link the comment to the blog with a linkof type comment-on.

[blog “Minding the Planet” http://novaspivack.typepad.com [topics“knowledge management” “artificial intelligence” “Metaweb”] [slot Notes“This is a cool site. You should read it”]

[begin ignore] . . . some text . . . [end ignore]—causes the system toignore some text. Ignored text will not be indexed and no semcards willbe created about or from it.

Email

When a new semcard is created via email, an automated program (“bot”)can be set (via account preferences) to send the user an email with alink to the semcard, and/or the HTML form for the semcard, so that theycan immediately—or later—fill it out further with more data.

Attachments are handled intelligently. A separate semcard isautomatically created for every attachment and the semcard for the emailmessage is linked to the semcard for the attachment by a“has-attachment” link.

The system can recognize, analyze and process various types ofattachments like vcards, ical, standard documents types, RSS, etc.

Every e-mail that is sent to a user via the system contains a set ofsemantic links along the bottom of the message for quick reference,search, and other activities including: Help (gets you help), Home(brings you to your account with the on-line service), Undo (undoeswhatever the last command was).

My Hotnode has a UT that is similar to a weblog—That is I and othervisitors to it can navigate and search it, just like a blog or any othertype of site. But if a particular user has access privileges they canalso create new items on my hotnode, or edit items, etc. Usually theadmin/owner is the only one who can create new hotnodes. Unless it is agroup hotnode, in which case there might be one admin but many peoplewith authoring and editing permissions. Some people could just author,others could just edit, others could be allowed to author and edit. etc.So there's more policy controls on items than a typical wiki, but it canbe as open as a wiki too if the admin allows it.

It's easy to create new wiki nodes—which are essentially new postings.You can do it via the web interface, or via email, or IM, etc.

There are a bunch of default “Views” that you can provide on yourHotnode. Every Hotnode must have at least a homepage for that node thatthe public sees (unless it's a hidden Hotnode), and must have at leastan Admin page that the admin can see.

Other sections that can be optionally added into your hotnode include:

-   -   Weblog view (show items posted to “Weblog” by time, and archive        anything older than x days, weeks, etc. in archive links—see my        blog for examples www.novaspivack.typepad.com). Basically in        Typepad, every element of my blog is a chunk that I can add in        or take out very easily in my Typepad Control Panel.    -   Wiki view (navigate items by node tree structure, starting from        a root node)    -   Bliki view (navigate items by node tree structure, where every        node is a weblog that lists anything posted to it        chronologically)    -   Sitemap view (I can define the preferred navigational structure        of my site and make a map)    -   Directory—the complete directory navigation system    -   Authors directory—articles in your node listed by author    -   By date    -   By popularity (cumulative number of hits per posting)    -   By activity (items ranked by volume of hits in last n hours)    -   By type (ontology types)    -   By rating (using our rating scale)    -   By cited URLs directory—branch that lists items by URLs they        cite (each URL is a category)    -   By cited domains    -   By related people (by names of people occurring in your content)    -   By related companies    -   By related places    -   By referring URL (we look at trackbacks and make a directory of        sites that refer to your site, under which we list for each        referring site what items on your site they point to)    -   My writing    -   My offers    -   My requests    -   by related products    -   by related services    -   by related events    -   by related topics    -   by my friends (the categories are people you name as friends,        any articles posted by them or by you to them are listed for        each)        Display and Slot Mechanisms of Semcards

A semcard can have sharing policies associated with every one of itsslot, making the viewing of a single semcard different for people withdifferent access privileges to that semcard. In other words, ifS1[SL1:RU-SH1]represents sharing rules RU-SH1 for slot SL1 on semcard S1, then RU-SH1can hold information that restricts access (i.e. viewing, modifying,copying, forwarding, etc.) of a non-allowed party to the particularcontent of SL1, or completely to the existence of the slot itselfinclusive its content.

The semcard display rules can display content from semcards other thanthe one they belong to. They do this by referencing the slots in othersemcards, and specifying how the content of those slots should bedisplayed in the context of the semcard that they belong to. In otherwords, ifS1[D1:R1]represents semcard S1 containing display rules D1, and display rules D1containing reference R1, and further, ifS2SL1:C1]represents slot SL1 on semcard S2 with content C1, we letR1→S2[SL1:C1]stand for the fact that that reference R1 is a reference to content C1in slot SL1 in semcard S2, and D1 holding the display instructions forhow this slot should be displayed in the context of semcard S1. The fullexpression isS1[D1:R1→S2[SL1:C1]],which reads “semcard S1 has a reference R1 which references content C1of slot SL1 on semcard S2 according to display rules D1”.

-   -   The mechanism effectively turns every semcard into a kind of        “microportal”. every hotnode=gomeme=microportal about        something=semantic wiki node    -   every hotnode has a URI permalink    -   every hotnode has a UI    -   the UI can include any slots from the type for the hotnode    -   the UI can include any other items in the system (other        hotnodes, or slots from hotnodes), inline    -   the UI can include all sorts of widgets too (chat room,        discussion, whiteboard, game, vote, list, shopping cart,        guestlist, comments, photo album, buttons, sliders, meters,        charts, media streams, etc.)    -   the UI can include art and text etc. in HTML for example    -   Widgets in the UI can include rules—so when you click on a        button something in particular can happen    -   Agents can be attached to a hotnode to do things—like keep it up        to date, send alerts, etc.    -   Every hotnode has policies on it governing who can see it, who        can change policies, who can add to or edit content in it, etc.    -   Every hotnode can be subscribed to as RSS or Atom or email        digest or IM alerts, etc.    -   Every hotnode can be published to (via API, via IM, or via email        to an address for that hotnode)    -   a hotnode can link to other hotnodes via semantic links to        express relationships between hotnodes    -   body text in a hotnode can link to resources with URLs (any        file, web page, or even another hotnode) via standard hotlinks    -   hotnodes can carry “attachments” (these are data that can be        uploaded to, or downloaded from, the hotnode—that may or may not        travel with the hotnode)    -   Fields in hotnodes recognize wiki codes and generate new        hotnodes or link to existing hotnodes from them    -   Our system has mining agents that mine various types of content        and make/update hotnodes from them—mining the web, mining email,        mining IM, mining local files, mining wikipedia, mining various        other content sites—anyone can make one of these agents for        their particular content, and it will mine it make hotnodes in        their nodespace on hotnode.com    -   via our formats and API external services can also use scripts        to create and post hotnodes to us from their apps    -   we provide authoring tools (via Web and desktop) for end-users        to manually create hotnodes    -   we provide tools for end-users to search, surf, etc. our network    -   we give everyone an account on our system—which gives them their        own nodespace where they can author and aggregate hotnodes    -   we also give accounts to groups/communities and online services        that wish to have nodespaces    -   an interesting use of this system is that we make a microportal        for every “thing” on the net—every site, person, place, event,        company, product, service, topic, etc. These things can be        interacted with like little portals—people can post to them,        link to them, link from them, register with them, subscribe to        them, and track an interest via them, meet via them, etc.

Miscellaneous Notes

We make an IE toolbar plug-in (the radar toolbar we have already) thatis designed to replace BOTH the browser's regular address bar (fortyping in URLs) and things like the Google toolbar etc.

Basically, if you type a URL into it, it will launch your browser tothat URL (and send the URL to your hotnode account to be stored there!).But if you type a query or command it will get executed. So the toolbaris an intelligent command line. It should be 2 lines wide so that it canask you a question in there and you can reploy, and it scrolls up downso you can see the history.

So you can . . .

-   -   use it to control your IE browser (launch URLs), instead of        using the default address bar in IE    -   use it to search the web (via Hotnode)    -   use it to ask hotnode questions    -   use it to send/receive IM's/from your friends    -   use it to enter commands to Hotnode (like make a new hotnode for        “Joe Smith”, or remind me of x in 2 days, etc.)    -   use it to see what's related to whatever the browser is        currently focused on (“? Related people”)    -   use it to command local apps to do things (“new email” launches        a new email msg form in your local email app, or your webmail)    -   set your online status (“my status=busy”)    -   teach your hotnode things (“john smith is my friend”)    -   get alerts from your hotnode agents (“nova it's time for your        meeting”—hotnode can even send commands to your toolbar, causing        your browser to open pages, including pages it generates on the        fly for you—for example your Hotnode can alert you that a        meeting is about to start and take you to the page for the        Hotnode about that meeting) And we should make it extensible so        that other's can add to it's functionality!

We can totally embrace and extend the browser . . .

Although the above description may contain specific details, they shouldnot be construed as limiting the claims in any way. Other configurationsof the described embodiments of the invention are part of the scope ofthis invention. Accordingly, the appended claims and their legalequivalents should only define the invention, rather than any specificexamples given.

The invention claimed is:
 1. A method of managing a set of interrelatedknowledge objects, the method comprising: receiving a user request tocreate a knowledge object of one of a plurality of object types that isassociated with a predetermined semantic structure suitable to representthe knowledge object; filling out a template specific to the object typehaving a plurality of predetermined fields based on instructions fromthe user; creating the knowledge object of the object type in a webnamespace based on the filled-out template; analyzing the knowledgeobject to identify metadata associated with the knowledge object;creating a semantic link between the knowledge object and anotherknowledge object of the set of interrelated knowledge objects, based onthe identified metadata; and managing a subscription by a second user toknowledge objects in the web namespace subject to on a plurality ofrules specifying how the knowledge objects are filtered before deliveryto the second user, how often the knowledge objects are delivered, andhow the knowledge objects are routed to the second user, wherein atleast one of the steps is performed by a computer.
 2. The method ofclaim 1, further comprising, tracking a set of rules governingpermission to access the set of interrelated knowledge objects.
 3. Themethod of claim 2, wherein, the set of rules are specifiable by anadministrative user of the set of interrelated knowledge objects.
 4. Themethod of claim 1, wherein, the user is one or more of, theadministrative user, or another using having access rights in the webnamespace.
 5. The method of claim 1, wherein the template isuser-modifiable to add a field to or remove a field from the pluralityof predetermined fields.
 6. The method of claim 1, wherein, theknowledge object is associated with a knowledge database.
 7. The methodof claim 6, wherein, the knowledge database is an ontology or taxonomy.8. The method of claim 1, wherein, the plurality of object typesincludes a person, a project, a document, a question, and a topic.
 9. Amethod, comprising: receiving a request to create a customized webnamespace from an administrator; identifying user preferences specifiedby the administrator comprising permissions governing access rights by avisitor of the customized web namespace; wherein the visitor isexclusive of the administrator; enforcing the governing access rights ofthe customized web namespace by the visitor; receiving a request fromthe administrator to add content to the customized web namespace;filling out a template of a particular semantic structure based on anidentified type of the content to be added; adding the content to thecustomized web namespace based on the filled-out template; associatingthe content with a knowledge data structure; receiving an access requestfrom the visitor to interact with the customized web namespace, whereinthe access request comprises one or more request for, viewing, writing,or editing one or more of the plurality of knowledge objects in the webnamespace; determining the permissions governing access or edit rightspossessed by the visitor; and in response to determining that thevisitor possesses the permissions to satisfy the access request receivedfrom the visitor, enabling the visitor to interact with the webnamespace, wherein visibility or edit ability or the content to thevisitor is determined by at least one privacy setting in the userpreferences, and wherein at least one of the steps is performed by acomputer.
 10. The method of claim 9, wherein, the template isuser-specifiable or user-modifiable by selecting to show, hide, add,delete, or reordering slots in the template.
 11. The method of claim 9,wherein, a particular semantic structure is associated with a contenttype for representing, a person, a project, a document, a question, or atopic.
 12. The method of claim 9, further comprising, granting defaultaccess and edit permissions of a web-object in the customized webnamespace to the administrator.
 13. The method of claim 9, furthercomprising, managing a subscription to the content for the subscriberuser based on the set of rules.
 14. The method of claim 9, wherein, thevisitor interacts with the customized web namespace via one or more of aweb browser, an email client, and an Rich Site Summary (RSS) client. 15.The method of claim 9, wherein, the visitor interacts with thecustomized web namespace via one or more of Extensive MarkupLanguage-Remote Procedure Call (XML-RPC) and Simple Object AccessProtocol (SOAP) clients.
 16. The method of claim 9, wherein, thecustomized web namespace is semantic-search enabled.
 17. A system formanaging a set of interrelated knowledge objects, the system comprising:a processor and memory, cooperating to function as: means for areceiving unit configured to receive a user request to create aknowledge object of one of a plurality of object types that isassociated with a predetermined semantic structure suitable to representthe knowledge object; means for a filling unit configured to fill out atemplate specific to the object type having a plurality of predeterminedfields based on instructions from the user; means for a creating unitconfigured to create the knowledge object of the object type in a webnamespace based on the filled-out template; means for an analyzing unitconfigured to analyze the knowledge object to identify metadataassociated with the knowledge object; means for a second creating unitconfigured to create a semantic link between the knowledge object andanother knowledge object of the set of interrelated knowledge objects,based on the identified metadata; and means for managing a subscriptionby a second user to knowledge objects in the web namespace subject to ona plurality of rules specifying how the knowledge objects are filteredbefore delivery to the second user, how often the knowledge objects aredelivered, and the knowledge objects are routed to the second user.